Details of this weekend's Self Racing Cars hackathon in Berkeley

For those in the SF Bay Area and interested in the DIY autonomous car scene (which I'm also part of), here's the latest on our hackathon this weekend.

Self Driving Racers, Carl, Joshua and I are looking forward to seeing you all this Sunday (10:00am - 3:00pm) in Berkeley for the meetup/hackathon. Here's some information to help you prepare and otherwise make the most of the event. It's going to be mostly indoors, in Carl's new workshop (in that happy window between a new space and it being totally filled with equipment). Here's about 1/4 of it, under construction a few weeks ago:

In that space, we're going to have a track. By "track" I mean strips of colored tape, roughly like this (thanks to the Formula Pi team for the inspiration):

If you want to race, bring a ~1/10 scale car/rover (anything under about two feet long) that is capable of autonomous navigation with computer vision. Already got something like that? Great! If not, if you've got a RC car and Raspberry Pi + camera, you can start with the Formula Pi code (forked version here), although please note that that code does assume you're using the ZeroBorg motor controller board with a Raspberry Pi Zero. If you don't have that board, you'll have to modify the code to support whatever motor controller you are using.

I'll have 3-4 Raspberry Pi-based rovers available for people to hack on. They don't have the ZeroBorg boards, so no guarantees that they're ready to roll without modifications. But who knows? Perhaps I'll have them running by then.

As an additional navigation aid, we'll have a ultrawideband indoor positioning system set up. This uses the Pozyx system, so if you've got one of those, you should be able to use that. What about larger autonomous cars, from go-karts to full-size? If you've got one, bring it for show and tell! We may have access to the parking lot a block away for some slow-speed driving, but no guarantees and definitely no racing.

The famous Carl Bass autonomous monkeymobile will be there. Rides may be offered, although you'll have to fight the monkey for the wheel.

Other stuff that will be provided: Tables, chairs, power, wifi, coffee, pizza. And interesting fun.

Don't worry if you don't have anything to bring/hack on. You're welcome to just hang out and do the meetup thing. Or help others hack their things. This is that brief moment where we can all be n00bs. Someday our cars are supposed to be perfectly safe and autonomous. But for now, let's hack and crash while we still can.